Visual Studio 2013 has a cool new feature called Browser Link. You can read about it here and here. It doesn’t seem to work flawlessly yet, according to a colleague of mine but nevertheless it’s a great feature.

If you want to enable browser link for static html files you must do something extra by adding a StaticFileHandler to your Web.config and make sure you set runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests to true:

<system.webServer>
  <handlers>
    <add name="Browser Link for HTML" path="*.html" verb="*"
         type="System.Web.StaticFileHandler, System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0,
               Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
         resourceType="File" preCondition="integratedMode" />
  </handlers>
  <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
</system.webServer>

This is all well documented so it shouldn’t pose a problem. I had everything configured and ready to go but I kept getting a ‘No current connections’ message in the Browser Link Dashboard when hitting http://localhost/

BrowserLinkDashboard

After reading the documentation again, checking my config again and Googling around, I thought: maybe I shouldn’t hit http://localhost/ but instead visit http://localhost/index.html. Not sure why but it started working! Apparently, the static file handler doesn’t run when not explicitly invoking a *.html page?

The strange thing is, now that I’ve hit /index.html once, I can’t reproduce the problem anymore. No matter how I enter the site, Browser Link works. But if you ever encounter this problem, try visiting the page you want directly and do not depend on the default page.

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